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An Altered Book Page plus a Daguerrotype Case

August 6, 2009 marks the 10th birthday of the Altered Books yahoo group. To celebrate, Corrine Stubson, one of altered books "mamas" for the past six years and a passionate bookbinder (among her many, many talents as an altered book artist) came up with a tremedous idea: alter a page, send the original to Corrine, she will bind a 4" x 6" book with your original page plus colour copies of all the other pages of participants in the "swap" and send it to you as a gift!

With over 7,000 members in the group, this could get interesting! Within a few days, nearly 100 people had signed up (me included). WOW... that's going to be quite the book when she's done and she will be binding, binding, binding... night and day... day and night!

She is one brave woman to take on a project of this magnitude! You'll never catch me doing something like this(GRIN)! I have enough projects that I would like to do to keep me going full tilt boogy for at least twenty years...

Personally I think this is one project that could be submitted to one of the magazines. It's going to be pretty awesome and worthy of a magazine article when she's finished!

With a couple of very busy weeks coming up for me, I decided I had better get my rear in gear and get my page done early... they are due July 20! So here's a sneak peak of the page I will be submitting... don't ya just love the quote?

Daguerrotype Case

Here's another project I did a couple of weeks ago that was fun (and frustrating at moments) to do! The frustrating part came in when I could have used smaller fingers in the construction of the boxes. You'll understand why when you discover how big it is!

I really like the old daguerrotype cases that our ancestors used to carry with them that had a picture of a loved one in it. Well one day when I was doing some metal embossing, I got to thinking about them and wondered if I couldn't figure out a way to make one. I had done some research on them and discovered that most of them (certainly those that were to be carried in pockets) were quite small.

I thought at first of using a small matchbox to make it but it just wasn't the right size. So I made two little cardboard boxes myself and covered them with some faux leather paper that I had made for another project kicking around my art table. I wanted to be able to open and close the case when it was done. A piece of paper glued to the middle of the boxes to hold them together did the trick. Some copper foil around the edges and the main boxes were done. I roughed the finished boxes up some to give it a grungy look!

Next, I embossed some metal for a frame, grunged it up some, re-sized an image to fit the frame opening and cut out a piece of clear plastic to protect it. I sandwiched all of these together and glued them into one side of the box.

For the box on the other side, I cut out a piece of light cardboard, padded it with some fibre fill, covered it with a piece of green velvet, glued it into the other box, then glued on an antique metal button from my stash.

Voila, my prototype of a very grungy, battered and old looking daguerrotype case.

Now that I have figured out how to do this, I'll be making some "refinement" changes next time round. That said, I was rather pleased with myself that it worked out just about the way I had envisioned it. You may be wondering how big it is. Well how's 2 x 2-1/2 inches!!

Welcome!

My name is Sharon House and I would like to welcome you to my site. Inspired by a lifelong love affair with art and storytelling, I am a self taught artist who combines both loves through sculpting and creating polymer clay characters that tell a story.